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Comment by FTA | Hacker News Reader

Ever since I heard about Sci-Hub, I knew judgements along this line would be incoming eventually.

The only way to solve the science publishing problem is from the top down: lean on scientific funding agencies for them to mandate results must be published in an open access journal. Take it a step further and say none of this "pay-us-super-extra-money-on-top-to-open-your-article-up-early" garbage either.

Hesitation from many scientists to publish in open access is that many full open access journals are not as popular and thus you lose some impact or credibility to the works when publishing in them. But if everyone is forced to migrate to open access, that will go away--perhaps with a few years of turbulence.

Otherwise, the behemoths like RELX and Wiley will endlessly pursue any sort of effort to open up their copyrighted material (and rightly so within their legal rights), just like the RIAA and music sharing.

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> Otherwise, the behemoths like RELX and Wiley will endlessly pursue any sort of effort to open up their copyrighted material (and rightly so within their legal rights), just like the RIAA and music sharing.

Who cares? They will burn their money in court in exchange for literally nothing. That is exactly the result the world should hope for.

> The only way to solve ... top down ... mandate ... everyone is forced

Or you could think carefully through the incentive structure of the scientific publishing system to see if there are places where small tweaks could go a long way. This is a system that emerged over centuries, and using your top-down hammer may change it in the short-run, but it will invariably morph into something unintended and unexpected if the proper incentives are not in place to guarantee long-term success. And I don't think those incentives should be another dose of your hammer.

The landscape includes many parties: researchers who produce papers, journals that publish papers, consumers who read papers, institutions that pay for journals, institutions that fund research, and institutions that employ researchers. There are probably more. All of them have different costs, preferences, and incentives. Disentangling that web may yield some very good opportunities for improvement, either as policy, advocacy, or entrepreneurship.

Don't get me wrong for a second: I'm not defending the copyright lobby and its obscene partnership with the state.

What is your objection to simply solving the problem? Why is it unreasonable to have public funds go to publicly-available research? Is there some reason that we as a society should care if rent seeking middle men who provide no value are disenfranchised?

It sounds to me like you're so slavishly devoted to Silicon Valley economics that you want to incentivize nails rather than use a hammer.

> What is your objection to simply solving the problem?

Perhaps I don't know a perfect solution, but I know that top-down solutions often produce negative unintended consequences.

> rent seeking middle men who provide no value

I hate rent seeking and would love to see it eliminated from all sectors of the economy. But non-rent-seeking middle men often provide immense value to society, which is why they exist in the first place.

> slavishly devoted

Do you insult everyone you encounter online?

> Why is it unreasonable to have public funds go to publicly-available research?

I never said this was unreasonable, merely that it's complicated.

Of course, my "Silicon Valley economics" approach would be to start with a reduction in copyright regulations and privileges (along with patents for that matter).

This is a situation where it's not complicated. A number of fields have simply stripped the commercial journals out of their midst. It works beautifully.

The answer to your question is literally in the first paragraph of that comment.

> This is a system that emerged over centuries, and using your top-down hammer may change it in the short-run, but it will invariably morph into something unintended and unexpected if the proper incentives are not in place to guarantee long-term success.

I.e. scientific publishing, like almost everything else that involves humans, is a dynamic system. Smash it, and it will reconstruct itself in some form or other. If you don't change underlying incentives, you'll end up in a similar state with which you started. See also: comments that refer to "regrettable substitution" in the comment page here.

It's not "Silicon Valley economics", it's just a basic application of reason.

I think the difference here is that the system itself is vestigal; JSTOR et. al. made sense when there was not a convenient collection or distribution method for journals, but at this point, such groups are not providing any actual benefit that could not be replicated for an extremely minimal cost by the journals themselves, or just abandoning the cost altogether. Already, many fields have started publishing pre-prints for free on various sites and the model works fine.

I appreciate caution as much as the next person, but we've been operating with the natural alternatives for some time now without any issues; the incentives for researchers and universities when it comes to publishing articles hasn't really changed, nor has the incentive for the the public (academics or otherwise) that want to consume them. The only part of this system that has an incentive to keep the old system is the publishers themselves, because they're no longer a required component. Their infrastructure and their pricing schemes are no longer beneficial and have been replaced, while the incentives for the researchers publishing and the audience consuming are provided and met by the replacement systems.

Removing the publishers isn't a hammer destroying it from the top-down, it's an appendectomy like prodecure.

> Or you could think carefully through the incentive structure of the scientific publishing

We already have such an incentive system: patents. Sadly, they are pretty flawed. The deal with patents is that the government grants you a monopoly right over your idea if you describe and publish it. Problem is that they are expensive to obtain, and the language of a patent is designed for lawyers, and is so obtuse and difficult to read that they are almost useless for practitioners. But the fundamental incentive to publish ideas and make them free to read is there.

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